Sapere Aude
Month: November 2012
someone turned my thoughts on cupcakes into a cupcake. this makes me really happy. the sooner this sugary crap disappears into the 7th circle of hell where it came from, the better.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, even those of us who really like cupcakes. Gourmet cupcakes are a terrible business to start or expand for a number of fundamental economic reasons.
ah zurich. always such zeal in sweeping unsightly things under the rug. a few years ago they standardized newsstands and public trash cans, arguing that the wide variety of shapes was an eyesore.
Zurich is to open drive-in sex boxes in an attempt to rid the town of street prostitution.
CFR is designed to prepare first responders to effectively and efficiently act to counter any type of cyber-based terror attack against our nation’s internet, communications, and network-based infrastructure. This is an intense, hands-on course for skilled technical personnel who meet specific technical prerequisites, and are responsible for responding to agency assistance calls for potential cyberterrorism activity.
wat. oh, of course, your tax $ at work.
equator to hot for tropical plants, and 20 degrees celsius at the poles. this happened.
the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
The thing about bronze is that it requires long supply lines. To make a bronze sword in Greece, you might need tin from Cornwall and copper from Cyprus. Except for a small area in Asia Minor, tin and copper deposits don’t co-occur. The Bronze Age was therefore a time of international trade and travel. Art from the Middle East turned up in Norway and Afghanistan, that sort of thing.
2023-02-11: Evidence for a climate factor in the collapse
Here we examine the collapse of the Hittite Empire 3200 BP. The Hittites were one of the great powers in the ancient world, with an empire centered in a semi-arid region in Anatolia with political and socioeconomic interconnections throughout the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, which for a long time proved resilient despite facing regular and intersecting sociopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Examination of ring width and stable isotope records obtained from contemporary juniper trees in central Anatolia provides a high-resolution dryness record. This analysis identifies an unusually severe continuous dry period from around 1198 to 1196 (±3) BC, potentially indicating a tipping point, and signals the type of episode that can overwhelm contemporary risk-buffering practices.
Living cells captured in pyramid cages
this is amazing. i suspect that as our skills in the nano realm increase, our designs will look more like the cell and less like platonic solids.
perfect place for a QR code.
the fun of watching the crazies self-destructing will be with us for a while:
Clearly, the only explanation for all this delusion is that conservative media and campaign consultants, steeped in years of confidently lying about everything from global warming to the causes of the deficit, got a little too bold about their ability to create their own realities. The only question is whether conservatives will learn their lesson and exhibit more skepticism about their self-selected news media in the future. The answer is almost surely no, for a very good reason: Conservative credulousness is so baked into the culture of the right that it could well be considered a defining feature.
Rescueing NYC’s drowned Internet. copper being replaced with fiber optics.
km of copper is ruined not only in the cable vault at Broad Street, but also at 20 or so manholes around the area. Even worse, paper insulation in the copper wiring sucks water through the cabling from capillary action, destroying cabling even in dry areas. It’s “far too tedious, time consuming, and not effective of a process to try and put this infrastructure back together,” so Verizon’s taking the opportunity to rewire with fiber optics instead. Service has been restored to FiOS customers for over a week — unlike copper, fiber optics aren’t damaged by the water. As part of this process, crews have already pulled fiber up the major corridors — including Water, Broad, and Pearl Streets — to ultimately connect the fiber network to buildings.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 